


Patience

by trollprincess



Category: Lost Boys (1987)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-24
Updated: 2011-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-28 01:42:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/302341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trollprincess/pseuds/trollprincess
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If there's one thing Michael taught me, it's patience.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Patience

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fourfreedoms](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourfreedoms/gifts).



If there's one thing Michael taught me, it's patience.

*

For a while, you get drunk every night in your bedroom. You excuse it for a few reasons; because you're a teenager, because Star's family decided they needed a change after Star came home and moved all the way to Seattle, because for that one confusing week you were a vampire. Your mother lets it slide for the same reasons: because you're a teenager, because your girlfriend's gone, because for that one confusing week you were a vampire.

You could go out and drink, be social, make inoffensive jokes with the same naïve popular morons you'll need to befriend to survive at Santa Carla High School. But you stay home, safe and snug in the warm embrace of your new bedroom. Getting trashed in public in Santa Carla at night is a bad idea, even now.

You're more comfortable in the dark, alone with a bottle of illegally obtained beer, with your mom downstairs murmuring her worries to your straight-talking grandfather. You could go downstairs, could add an edge of defiance to every deliberate sip of beer you swallow. But your mom saw the six-pack and your grandfather's got pot growing on the windowsill, and you're sure getting drunk's not nearly as rebellious as inadvertently joining the undead.

You try to avoid your little brother on those nights, because your mother worries but your brother whines and nags and pushes.

Even after everything that's happened, you like it alone in the dark.

*

Months pass. Summer leaves, and fall blows in, and you stop drinking alone in your room every night. Now, you just stick to Saturdays. You'll stop eventually, in theory.

You don't make friends. It's not worth it to make friends. People still disappear in Santa Carla even now, still vanish one day only to be found stabbed and shot and raped the next. Even without the vampires, Santa Carla is a dark place, a shadow place, a place where dead things move in the streets.

You keep quiet, and do your homework, and keep your head down. All you have to do with your time is study, study, study. You've never had grades this good. Your mother doesn't know whether to be thrilled or call a psychiatrist.

Your little brother hovers, a worrier in training under your mother's careful tutorial. He tries to lure you out of the house, down to the beach, onto the boardwalk, but nothing he says entices you. You picture the exotic swirl of Star's loose skirts snaking through the boardwalk crowds, the eerie rumble of your stomach at the scent of blood, the sound of your name said in that smooth cocky sneer. All of those memories slap you in the face every time you walk outside, so it's better to stay inside with that decorative collection of dead animals and the faint whiff of marijuana that just barely clings to your grandfather's ratty old robe.

Still, your little brother watches, touches, drags out the occasional laugh. He's a good kid, and it helps.

*

A year passes. You graduate, and your little brother comes out of the closet.

You make jokes about it, about how someone can even come out of the closet when the door to the closet has some cheesecake photo of Rob Lowe on the front of it. Your brother lets it slide, smiles that boyish smile and wears a ridiculous amount of pink even for current fashion trends. He's still navigating the halls of Santa Carla High with far more social interaction than you bothered with, joining the track team, writing the school newspaper. You didn't even know they had a school newspaper that consisted of anything more than a stapled sheath of “Missing” flyers.

You're still at your grandfather's house, working at the arcade on the boardwalk on the weekdays and taking a couple of barely affordable night classes at the local community college. You've got one foot out the front door, but you can't quite bring yourself to pull the other one out and make a run for it.

Your brother is just as clingy as usual, drapes his arm around your neck and hangs off you like some drunken spider monkey, and for the first time ever you wonder what it all means.

*

Another year passes. You are still in Santa Carla, still at Grandpa's, but jerking off at the thought of your little brother is something new.

You don't make it obvious, not even to anyone who might walk in on you with your hand stroking your cock like you've developed a concentrated form of epilepsy based solely in your wrist. It's just you and your completely wrong thoughts and your demanding erection. You feel like some pornographic anomaly, broken at the sight of your baby brother growing into his lean muscles and teasing muscles. You can't decide whether to go find a girl to fuck or just be ashamed alone in your room.

It's terrifying, how your little brother's turned you back into a sex-crazed fifteen-year-old all over again.

You don’t know what did it, whether it was the clownish cheer that lights up his grin or the husky giddiness of his laugh. He’s always there, poking at you and poking at you and poking at you, and somewhere along the way you forgot that he’s the one that came out of the closet, not you.

*

Another year passes. Your little brother threatens to graduate somewhere near the top of his class.

He snags the attention of two or three random colleges who all offer to give a few credits for free each semester. Your mom beams at his enthusiasm, at her baby boy who’s turned into a smart handsome young man, albeit one who casually checks out the asses of other smart handsome young men. It’s almost unsettling, that she can be just as proud of her loser son who’s still handing out change at an arcade full-time as she is of the son who’s getting scholarship offers from UCLA and Penn State and some obscure private university in Iowa, of all places.

You still jerk off in the privacy of your room to the echo of his laughter through the thin walls. You even keep it up after your brother barges in you, catches you in the act, politely ignores it and proposes his idiotic scheme.

His damn stupid, completely moronic, and strangely _right_ scheme.

*

A month passes. Your younger brother graduates, and you say yes to his crazy idea.

You don’t know what drives you to agree. What you know is that when you say yes, he’s so damn thrilled that he kisses you.

He kisses you, and kisses you, and kisses you again. After that, you can’t bring yourself to regret your stupid decision.

*

Another month passes, and the car is packed.

Your little brother makes lists and excuses. He makes lists of what you need to bring – water guns, machetes, makeshift flamethrowers constructed in your grandfather’s creepy taxidermy room. And he makes excuses to your mother – he’ll go to college eventually, it’ll be good for the two of you to bond, you could both use some time away from Santa Carla.

Luckily, your mother is your mother. She’d support you both through a murder trial if she had to.

You pack your clothes, some weapons, some research books you liberated from the Santa Carla public library. You throw pillows and blankets in the back seat of Grandpa’s Ford Fairlane, check everything under the hood again and again.

Your little brother does the investigating, finds a few familiar cases in New Mexico and Tennessee and Wisconsin. He maps out your trek, does the math on gas and food, accounts for weather and room and board.

You only barely talk the Frog brothers out of making you a pair of “Professional vampire slayers” shirts. It’s not a good idea to advertise.

*

That’s how I learn patience, Michael. I watch you after I crawl out of the sad excuse for a grave that the Frog brothers dumped me in. I watch you through your window at night for a very long time, quietly angry. I watch you fall slowly in love with your own little brother, see you question whether we broke you when we turned you and decide you don’t give a damn if we did.

I watch you as your mother and grandfather wave goodbye to the two of you, Michael, and I see Sam put his hand on your knee, and I smile when you leave it there.

I won’t attack your family, Michael. I don’t blame them, not even your grandfather. Just because he killed the vampire who turned me doesn’t mean I hold a grudge.

After all, Michael, there are a lot of vampires in Santa Carla. And if you want to join them, even for a second time, all you have to do is ask.

You’ll learn, Michael. I’ll make sure of it.    


End file.
